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Evan White in agreement to sign extension with Mariners

The alleged contract extension is $24 million over 6 years

Arizona Fall League All Star Game Photo by Christian Petersen/Getty Images

First thing early this morning, this tweet came along:

Followed by this one:

That last part of Passan’s tweet is what will catch most everyone’s attention, I’m sure. So, we’ve got an unprecedented early contract extension that is fairly large for a player who has no MLB service time yet. This is very interesting! What does it mean? Why did they do it? We’ll find out more soon, I’m sure, and we’ll keep you updated.

At first blush, this seems like a way to avoid the service time manipulation song and dance that MLB teams always have to play coy about when they do it. It also fully buys out Evan White’s club control so that the team can start him at the MLB level this coming season if they choose to. What this boils down to is now the team has 9 years of club control over White instead of the maximum of 7 if they’d gone the route of playing service time games (h/t to LLawyer Tim Cantu, esq.).

This is neat because it makes it very clear that the team is fully invested in Evan White, first baseman. And really, 6 seasons for $24 million is very reasonable in this day and age, assuming all goes well in the near future and White makes his MLB debut sometime in the 2020 season.

Perhaps this starts to set an precedent for the other heralded prospects in the Mariners system such as Julio Rodríguez, Jarred Kelenic, and Logan Gilbert. Time will tell as they approach the cusps of making their MLB debuts.

So, speculate and analyze away in the comments and happy Friday, y’all.

UPDATE - 8:16 AM